Meet The Speakers
As an “unconference” style event, we encourage as much participation as possible from everyone. Here is who will be joining us and sharing their expertise from keynote talks and short lightning talks to workshops and interactive sessions.
Request An InviteTom Chi
Tom Chi has worked in roles ranging from astrophysical researcher to Fortune 500 consultant to corporate executive developing hardware/software products & services. He pioneered and practices a unique approach to rapid prototyping and leadership that can jumpstart innovative new ideas and move large organizations at unprecedented speeds. He was head of Product Experience and a founding member of Google X, and currently works to accelerate a future where humanity becomes a net positive to nature
Nadya Direkova
Nadya Direkova is a designer focused on speed of innovation. She works as a Director of R&D at Airbnb and is a Founding member of the Samara division. To date, she has hosted over 100 design sprints to accelerate projects at Airbnb, Google [x] and Alphabet. Her key vision sprints include work with the White House, Self-Driving cars, Project Loon, Maps and Google Ads among others. She envisioned & co-founded the Google Sprint Master Academy to empower 300 senior creatives to run design sprints.
Josh Lovejoy
Josh works at the intersection of product design, ethics, and artificial intelligence. He believes that human-centered design thinking can change the world for the better; that by seeking to address the needs of people—especially those at the margins—in ways that respect, restore, and augment their capabilities, we can invent forms of technological innovation that would have otherwise been invisible.
Barry OReilly
Barry O’Reilly is a business advisor, entrepreneur, and author who has pioneered the intersection of business model innovation, organizational design, and culture transformation. Barry is author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results (out Nov 27, 2018), and bestseller Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale—part of the Eric Ries series, and a HBR must read for CEOs. He writes for The Economist, and is faculty at Singularity University.
Pauline Thomas
Pauline Thomas is a multifaceted professional: first artist then UX designer, sprint master, trainer, community builder, entrepreneur. As one of the pioneer in the UX field in France, she’s designed many services for international tech companies to major french cultural institutions and has trained more than 700 people. In 2012, Pauline set up a UX and Art community space in Paris named Le Laptop with the mission to bring purpose, happiness, and creativity at work by building a design culture. Pauline has been certified Google Sprint Master in 2015, she has run more than 60 design sprints.
Samuel Roussellier
Graduated from the Sorbonne University, Samuel has been a User Experience Designer for 15 years. He has worked for many content oriented projects and clients. He has founded and lead for 8 years (2007-2015) « Cellules.tv », a digital design studio, several times awarded for its innovative use of interactive media in storytelling. From strategy to art direction and technical stakes, Samuel has developed a multidisciplinary approach of digital design.
Tomomi Sasaki
Tomomi Sasaki is a partner at the Tokyo & Paris based design studio AQ, leading projects that deliver useful digital products and services for clients around the world. In the past few years, she’s extended her design research and facilitation skills to take on challenges like organizational culture change and transforming the employee experience. Say hi on Twitter @tzs.
Mike Edmonds
As Managing Director and VP of Product with Moonshot by Pactera Digital, Mike leads a team of digital product managers to help brands use design thinking and lean innovation to explore, discover, and deliver experiences that are lovable, valuable, and feasible. Mike has experience working with B2C and B2B organizations on a global scale, in the US, China, and Europe, across a range of industry verticals including retail, CPG, high tech, automotive, foodservice distribution, freight transportation, petroleum distribution, quick serve restaurants, gaming & betting, and government agencies.
Dana Vetan
Dana is the co-founder and Head of Training at the Design Sprint Academy who teaches business leaders from global organisations how to solve problems through Design Sprints. By combining the experience from hundreds of sprints, with her natural empathy and a background in Psychology, Dana has created a unique approach to training future facilitators by helping them overcome common biases and pitfalls, boost their confidence and play to their strengths.
Claire Shapiro
An anti-consultant consultant, Claire helps companies big and small challenge the status quo through practical, hands-on innovation methods. As one of the former leads of the Design Sprint Master Academy at Google, Claire is thrilled to be back at the conference this year with her former colleagues and friends. Her mixed background in operations, product and program management allows her to think from multiple perspectives as she approaches any challenge; it’s this interest in different perspectives that ultimately drove her to move to join Board of Innovation in Antwerp, Belgium, driving innovation around the globe for fortune 500 companies across all industries. Claire gets fired up about custom program design, creating new methods, femtech, service design, radical innovation, future forecasting, and of course, design sprinting!
Richard Kelly
Richard builds and re-establishes a culture of innovation for the Fung Group and its partners to change how the world works. He cultivates the capabilities of the people in the Group by engaging the businesses to create new value. Within the Academy, he re-enforces the concepts of ‘doing is learning’ and ‘learning by doing’. Apart from his role as a catalyst, Richard also acts as a coach and convener. Internally, he breeds curiosity and instigates tension as motivation across the Group. Externally, he thinks collaboratively about new questions with clients, while inspiring new opportunities with partners. He considers design a business enabler.
Sami Niemelä
Sami is a designer and creative director working at the intersection of systems, foresight, and design. In his daily work he helps teams, products and companies grow by design. Sami's work continues to push the industry forward with new thinking. His work has earned him international patents, numerous awards and has built exits to the largest companies in the world. Currently he is one of the founders and creative director design firm Nordkapp. He has also been invited to judge prestigious competitions such as the Webbys.
Burgan Shealy
Burgan is a senior interaction designer on the Chrome team focusing on the next billion users. She is passionate about spreading design sprint methodologies to the broader UX community. Prior to Google, she worked at IBM, where she took on design challenges in health, government, energy and retail. She also spent time working for a non-profit in Gulu, Uganda. Burgan received her MS in International Development from NYU and a BA in Graphic Design from UGA.
Syndey Hessel
Sydney is a User Experience Researcher at Google passionate about design sprints for social as well as business impact. She has run design sprints for a range of non-profit organizations like Planned Parenthood and Project Concern International, as well as many internal tools leveraged across Google. She also lead UX research for Google's first design sprint team based in Corporate Engineering. Sydney holds an MS in Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) from University of Washington, and currently serves on the board of Art Works for Change, a non-profit organization based in Oakland, CA.
Neha Saigal
Neha comes from a background in business strategy, advertising and product design. Leveraging these diverse fields, she now helps companies build and launch successful products through problem discovery, design sprints and business model innovation. As the founder of N5, she works with clients across various industries such as mobility & transportation, financial services, connected home and travel. She is constantly experimenting with new methods to help companies solve tough challenges and innovate with velocity. Her mission is to help founders get closer to their vision faster and build products that make a difference in the world. She’s passionate about enabling businesses through design as well as empowering teams to ask better questions and work more efficiently. In her down time she can be found scoping out new restaurants in SF and drinking rare teas from East China.
Gretchen Anderson
Gretchen consults with clients to inform their product strategy and improve team collaboration skills. She spent the first part of her career in design consulting for firms like frog design, Cooper, and LUNAR. Recently, she was head of design at PG&E, California’s largest energy company. Previously, she led the design of the hardware and software of a next-generation surgical system and was VP of Product at GreatSchools.org. Gretchen's past clients include Virgin Records, Samsung, Johnson & Johnson, and Intel. Gretchen is a Bay Area native who left only long enough to get a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in History & Literature. I have my own consulting practice, Gretchen Anderson Design.
Daniel Stilman
Daniel designs conversations for a living. An independent design facilitator and coach, he works with teams and organizations to frame and sustain productive and collaborative conversations. He loves working with clients of all shapes and sizes on product, service and organizational innovation. You can listen to him interview amazing people on The Conversation Factory podcast. He's also the author of the upcoming book, '9 Conversations: How Great Leaders Transform Communication, Collaboration, Culture and Themselves'
Kai Haley
Kai Haley is a UX designer leading the Design Relations team at Google, which supports design excellence for designers and developers building on Google's platforms. She is one of the founders and leads of the Sprint Master Academy, and trained over 300 Sprint Masters to drive innovation across Google’s diverse product areas. She is passionate about design thinking and inspiring the UX community to effectively utilize Design Sprints for speed and innovation. Prior to starting the Design Relations team, she applied her UX expertise to create monetization opportunities in Google search for the Search Ads Team. She earned a Masters Degree in Design from CCA, where she focused sustainable design practices and creating positive impact in the world.
Charbel Semann
Charbel Semaan launched Sprintwell to help organizations use sprints at scale. He helped Google’s product support teams scale from 2004 to 2008. After 20 years designing and teaching at Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn, Charbel helps organizations like SoundHound, Springs Global, and the former head of the CDC use design sprints for positive, sustainable change. Charbel mentors at the Stanford d.School, 500 Startups, and General Assembly, and enjoys being the family chef for his wife and three sons.
Becca Carroll
Becca Carroll is a senior venture designer at IDEO. She leads the R&D Studio for the IDEO CoLab multi-company innovation lab, where she focuses on helping organizations in financial services, energy, retail, automotive and healthcare grow their innovation capabilities by prototyping with emerging technologies. Prior to IDEO, she co-founded startups in real estate and healthcare. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a BA from Bates College.
Josh Silverman
For the past 23 years, Josh Silverman has partnered with businesses, non-profits, cities, and individuals on their success through design. He founded and scaled two design businesses, has advised founders and coached individuals, hosted and facilitated workshops globally, taught and guest critiqued nationally, and is always connecting people and communities. Currently, he is advising and designing for the portfolio of companies with Sequoia Design Lab, as well as his own client base. Most recently, he served as Twitter’s first hire in Design Operations. Josh is preternaturally curious about patterns in decision making and the shapes of teams. On the daily, he is driven by beautiful intersectionality, great pairings, trusting relationships, and long bike rides.
Nathalie Collins
Over the past decade, Nathalie has worked with businesses ranging from large corporations to nonprofit startups to introduce more human-centered products and services to the market. Before joining IDEO.org, she led projects at the intersection of hardware and software at Smart Design. Prior to that, she designed the user experiences of Microsoft’s Hotmail and PowerPoint products.Nathalie has lectured at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, and facilitated executive workshops at the Stanford d.school. She holds a master’s degree in Product Design from Stanford University and an undergraduate degree in Computer Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Southern California.
Douglas Ferguson
Douglas is an entrepreneur and human-centered technologist with over 20 years of experience. He is president of Voltage Control, an Austin-based workshop agency that specializes in Design Sprints and innovation workshops. Prior to Voltage Control, Douglas held CTO positions at numerous Austin startups where he led product and engineering teams using agile, lean, and human-centered design principles. While CTO at Twyla, Douglas worked directly with Google Ventures running Design Sprints and now brings this experience and process to companies everywhere. Douglas is active in the Austin startup community where he serves on the board of several non-profits, mentors startups, and advises early-stage ventures. Douglas spends his free time patching up modular synthesizers, playing guitar, and taking photographs. He graduated from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Vivek Bedi
Vivek Bedi is Vice President of Product for Northwestern Mutual. In this role, Vivek helps drives Northwestern Mutual’s client digital transformation through the development and delivery of digital products and features including client and advisor product platforms and apps. Vivek joined Northwestern Mutual in 2015 from Sterling Solutions, a provider of background-screening services, where he wasSenior Vice President of digital product and platform. Prior to Sterling Vivek was the SVP of Product Management (Client Experience) at Goldman Sachs.
Apeksha Garga
Apeksha Garga is Head of Design at Wealthfront with a passion to humanize finance. Previously she was at IDEO. Apeksha has over 10 years of experience championing the human-centered design process to help organizations create new businesses and reinvent existing ones. She has built and led multi-disciplinary design teams that seek insightful discoveries about human needs and behaviors to inspire meaningful and delightful product/service experiences for both users and businesses. Her background in design allows her to closely collaborate with her business stakeholders, designers, and engineers to tackle design challenges through a ‘build-to-think’ approach.Apeksha has experience working for Fortune 500 companies and new ventures. Her experience spans across industries such as consumer technology, finance, healthcare, automotive, education, furniture and retail.
Brooke Creef
Brooke Creef is a UX Manager specializing in Design Sprints at The Home Depot. At the Home Depot, Brooke works with a cross-functional leadership team to spearhead the Design Sprint scaling initiative. Specifically, The Home Depot is using Design Sprints at scale to drive design transformation, empower teams and foster a culture of innovation. Additionally, she trains facilitators and designers in design thinking, helps with resource management, project LoE, and sprint planning. Before joining The Home Depot, Brooke worked as a Consultant with clients such as Coca-Cola, UPS, State Farm, Cox Communications, AT&T, and The Weather Channel.
Nirali Shah
Nirali Shah is an Innovation Architect for CHILL (Cisco Hyperinnovation Living Labs). She works with customers and Cisco leadership to help create multi-party “Living Lab” innovation experiences to solve broad industry challenges. A believer in the transformative power of collaboration, Nirali strives to create the best innovation environment to pull the best ideas out of people’s heads. Following a customer lab, she works with stakeholders to drive solutions forward—whether that means an internal project or a brand new startup. Prior to joining Cisco, Nirali was the General Manager of a $6 million incubation business unit at innovation startup, Quirky Inc. She directly managed a cross-functional team of designers, engineers, product managers, sourcing and manufacturing associates and she was responsible for creating and directing go-to-market strategies for launching new product verticals for the company.
Samuel Chua
Sam is a culture hacker and the founder of Metacata, a human systems consultancy and venture studio. Recent public projects include roleplaying innovation workshops, cross-sector unconferences, 'life stuff' retreats, and talks on topics like design for civilizational change and machine-learning-age edupreneurship. Trained in cognitive science, he has helped clients all over Asia (including organizations like Li & Fung, Samsung, and Jones Lang LaSalle) research, reimagine, and redesign how people shop, work, live, and learn. Based in Asia, he lives in Kuala Lumpur.
Alesha Unpingco
Alesha Unpingco designs for both virtual and augmented reality as a user experience (UX) designer on the Google Daydream team. Prior to Daydream, she designed interactive experiences for various Google Ads & Commerce tools; led UX work for clients like Honda, Acura, and Intuit at Rubin Postaer and Associates; and applied design thinking methodologies to advance social good in startups, nonprofits, and higher ed.
Steve Arnold
Steve is a passionate problem solver who has spent the past two decades designing brand-defining product experiences. He currently heads up design for the Google app on Android and iOS. Prior to Google, he led the design for Twitter’s mobile development and publisher platforms. He was also Co-Founder & Chief Design Officer of Emberlight, a smart socket that tuned any bulb into a smart light which was sold at 270 Target stores nationwide. He has built product at Google, Twitter, Emberlight & Autodesk.
Jenny Gove
Jenny Gove is a User Experience Research Lead at Google, where she conducts research experiences on mobile web and apps. Jenny's current area of focus is Payments. Previously Jenny managed the Apps, Social, and Ads Design Research teams at Google, conducted research at Sun Microsystems, and designed interactive experiences at a startup, Zadu. Jenny started her career in academia, and was a Lecturer at the Open University, UK. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Southampton in the UK.
Meeta Patel
Meeta is the founder of Design Catalyst, LLC. With over 15 years of consulting experience, Meeta comes highly recommended and is passionate about infusing new ways of working to help companies imagine new possibilities for the future, stay relevant in a fast changing world and to rally together stakeholders around a common vision. Meeta has a unique approach that combines design thinking & business thinking to deliver surprising results by humanizing the business to create new value. Prior to Design Catalyst, Meeta was the Global Vice President of Design Thinking at SAP, reporting to a Board Member.
Betina García Nogués
Betina is a User Experience Designer, Researcher, and Sprint Master. She holds a Design degree from UBA (Universidad de Buenos Aires) and has always been passionately interested in UX. She teaches Usability at UTN (Universidad Tecnológica Nacional) for the first UX specialization in Argentina. She’s interested in leading teams into the UX process within companies. She is part of the Google Developers Experts program where she helps startups as a UX Mentor and facilitates Design Sprint within Launchpad events. Having worked in the design field for almost 15 years, mentoring and collaborating in different projects around the world. In 2017 joined Bibam Group as Head of UX where she leads a team of designers and researchers for the product design and services area of the company.
Sumier Phalake
Sumier is the product design lead for Google Station, which aims to bring sustainable public WiFi to bring connectivity to users in emerging markets. Prior to Google, he worked at IBM, where he took on design challenges in the media, entertainment, sports and retail industries. Sumier has worked extensively on social impact projects; using sprints and system/service design thinking with non-profits. He received his MS in Digital Media from GeorgiaTech.
Kami Thordarson
Kami Thordarson is among the leaders creating the new Campbell School of Innovation. She is the District’s in-house expert in Design Thinking and co-author of Design Thinking for School Leaders: 5 Roles & Mindsets That Ignite Positive Change (May, 2018). She believes CSI offers an opportunity to create changes to education that can better meet the needs of today’s students. Kami has worked in education as a teacher, curriculum coach, professional development designer, and administrator.
Kandis O'Brien
Kandis O'Brien is a digital transformation strategist and sprint facilitator who’s helped enterprise clients from Amex to Zebra Technologies innovate at scale. As co-founder of The SIX, she leverages a human-centered design mindset and tools like design sprints to help clients re-frame problems, imagine new possibilities and create new product, process and business model solutions. She’s trained and coached agile teams in Europe, China, India and the US, helping them build the organizational momentum to move from idea to experiment and execution faster. She is also the organizer of Design Sprint NYC and the event series, Design Thinking Blockchain.
Diana Liu
Diana Liu is Cofounder of THE SIX. Diana is a non-linear thinking business designer who loves to really get to know people. As co-founder of The SIX, a strategy and innovation consulting firm, she enjoys getting familiar with her constituents to the point where she can respond on their behalf to their needs, wants, and motivations. Diana has co-created with clients from Cisco, Microsoft, Apple, Sprint, and Recaro leveraging design thinking and design sprints. Diana has trained over 150 people in design thinking and the design sprint methodology, and is responsible for closing and managing over $85M in technology and strategy services revenue. Prior to the SIX, Diana was co-product owner of the Design for Digital service offering at Infosys Consulting and led an internal strategy and services incubator with over 250 global participants across 10 Business Units which achieved 425% ROI in Year 1. Diana is inspired by the road less traveled and great parking. Inertia is her kryptonite.
Surya Vanka
Surya Vanka is founder of AUTHENTIC, a design studio based in Seattle. He has worked as a multidiscipline designer at non-profits, startups, small businesses and large corporations for more than 20 years. Surya is best known for his work in user experience and for creating industry leading design practices such Design Swarms and Design Value Scorecard. He led Microsoft’s center of design excellence for several years, and helped transform the company towards an experience-first culture. Surya was a tenured professor of design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, fellow at the Center for Advanced Study and has taught design on every continent except Antarctica - he looks forward to teaching a design workshop at the South Pole one day.
Thorsten Borek
Thorsten was part of the founding team of germanys first low cost carrier hlx.com and consulted global brand for digital strategy, product development and digital transformation for over 15 years. Today he is the Co-Founder of NEON Sprints, a consulting- and training company. NEON is training and coaching leaders and teams to develop new products and services faster for industries like energy, pharmaceuticals, financial services, cosmetics, logistics, tourism, e-commerce, NGO’s but also consultancies. NEON not only focuses on the methodologies, like design sprints, but also on empowering the individuals who are working with these methods to to be successful. faster.
